PRIVACY fears prevent more than half of Scottish parents from posting their family pictures and videos on traditional social media, such as Facebook, and a Scottish start-up that aims to address their concerns has just launched a limited beta edition of their platform.

Kindaba describes itself as a family-focused private social network and, as well as going into beta, they have also secured an investment to help them expand internationally.

The firm was one of an inaugural cohort of five early-stage start-ups to be given funding by the Edinburgh-based pre-seed funding incubator Seed Haus, and received £30,000.

Seed Haus offers equity investment through a syndicate of high-profile Scottish entrepreneurs and investors including Sir Tom Hunter, video game innovator Chris van der Kuyl, and James Watt from BrewDog.

Calum Forsyth, Seed Haus CEO, said Kindaba’s product “spoke” to them.

“We’re excited about working with Kindaba,” he said. “The product really spoke to us. It addresses a pain point that impacts the founders directly, which is something we love to see in early-stage opportunities.

“Kindaba has a strong team who we believe are able to make this succeed.”

Rob Gelb founded Kindaba earlier this year after he experienced first-hand the challenge of maintaining online privacy.

Now the company’s CEO, he said: “I come from a privacy-conscious family. I have relatives all over the world who don’t feel comfortable using Facebook, but like me, want to follow the adventures of the latest new cousin and stay in touch.”

Gelb went on to speak to other families and found that he and his kin were not alone. According to a study from the communication watchdog Ofcom, 56 per cent of parents preferred to keep their family photos and videos away from social media for privacy reasons.

“I wanted a way for you to keep everyone up to date without worrying who else can see these moments,” said Gelb.

“Something that’s more private than Facebook, but that’s better suited to families and all their photos than WhatsApp. Internationalising Kindaba is on our roadmap. We currently have users in 13 countries and can’t wait to see how our member families stay connected, no matter where they are.”

Unlike the major, traditional networks, families using Kindaba can create private circles of household and family followers.

No-one is publicly discoverable, there are no ads on the site and simple privacy settings give users confidence in who can see anything that that they post or share.

“With Kindaba, you own your own content, and we don’t sell your personal data to anyone,” said company co-founder Lizzie Brough.

“A big problem with existing social networks is that you are the product.

“It’s in their best interest to understand you as much as they can so they can target ads to you for profit.

“That’s fine if you’re happy to give up a large degree of privacy, but the way public social networks go about that data mining is something that concerns a lot of people, especially parents.”

Forsyth said the timing of the launch was key: “The market has matured significantly in recent years ... Users are more digitally literate than ever before and are seeking strong privacy controls. We believe that Kindaba sit at this interface and add real value.”

Gelb and Brough founded Kindaba in January following two years of intensive market research. By February they had secured £55,000 in first round funding, at which point they entered the Entrepreneurial Spark Edinburgh Hub. They then expanded the team to four, and began building the platform. Now the Kindaba team are looking forward to launching their platform to a wider audience.

“The response so far has been exciting,” said Gelb.

“The more we talk to parents everywhere, the same issues are coming up again and again.

“The market is just getting started when it comes to targeted [Software-as-a-Service] SaaS for individuals. No-one’s doing it well for families yet, and we’re ready to change that.”

Kindaba is in a limited preview beta release and the next batch of invitations close soon – get on the list at kindaba.com.